We are pleased to announce that you can now assign the IP address of your choice to each of your Amazon EC2 instances you launch in your Virtual Private Cloud. This eagerly anticipated feature gives you greater control of your network configuration and makes it easier to run services within Amazon VPC that your users and applications expect to have a consistent IP address, such as DNS servers and Active Directory domain controllers. If you do not require your instance to have a specific IP address, you can continue to launch instances by specifying only a subnet, and AWS will continue to assign an IP address to your instance automatically. Please note that when you specify an IP address, it is retained for the instance’s lifetime. An IP address previously assigned to a running instance can only be used again once that instance is in a “terminated” state.

For more information about how to leverage this highly requested capability, please see the Amazon VPC documentation. Please note that ElasticFox has also been updated to support this capability.